From 6 August 2026, a change to the planning rules takes effect that most people will never hear about — but it could reshape the trees on our streets, in our gardens and on the small plots being built on all over the country.
Here is the short version.
What is changing
When land is developed, the law has, since 2024, usually required a small boost to nature — a “Biodiversity Net Gain” of at least 10%. In plain terms, a development is meant to leave nature a little better off than it found it.
From 6 August, the smallest sites — those of 0.2 hectares or less (about 2,000 square metres, roughly a third of a football pitch, or a small cluster of houses and their gardens) — no longer have to do this at all.
For hard-pressed small builders, that is a welcome simplification. But there is a catch for trees.
Why trees are caught in the middle
Under the old rules, removing even a single tree was usually enough to bring a small project into the nature-boost system — because of the way a tree’s protected “footprint” is measured. In practice, that meant a developer could not quietly fell a tree on a small plot without having to make good the loss.
The new rule swaps that “what is the impact?” test for a much simpler “how big is the site?” test. If the site is 0.2 hectares or smaller, the nature rules simply do not apply — however many trees are cleared.
What that means on the ground
On a site right at the new limit, the equivalent of up to 48 small trees — or around a dozen mature ones — could be removed with no requirement to replace or compensate for them under this system. And the trees most exposed are exactly the ones we tend to notice most: established trees on small urban and infill plots.
What still protects trees
It is not a free-for-all. Tree Preservation Orders, conservation-area rules and the special protections for ancient and veteran trees all still apply — they sit entirely outside this change. Some councils also have their own local tree policies: Bristol’s Tree Replacement Standard, for example, still requires replacement planting whatever the new exemption says.
The snag is that these local protections only exist where a council has actually put them in place — and not every council has.
Why it matters
The change is a sensible piece of red-tape reduction for small builders. But it is also, almost by accident, a real step back for the everyday trees that give our neighbourhoods shade, character and wildlife. From August, whether the trees near you are protected will depend less on national nature rules and more on whether your council has its own policies — and on whether a particular tree happens to be covered by an order.
If you value the trees around you, it is worth asking your local council what protections are in place.
We have set out the full detail — the mechanics, the legal position, and what to watch next — in an accompanying briefing note.
In January 2025 we argued that the West of England Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) would do little to improve biodiversity net gain (BNG) in proposed development sites in Bristol. Since then, three things have changed enough to warrant a second look:
The emerging Bristol Local Plan has moved to the final stages of the public examination and the timetable for the 2045 Local Plan has been published.
The West of England Mayoral Combined Authority (WECA) has published detailed guidance for developers and ecologists.
We have been able to measure how much of the city the LNRS focus areas cover.
These three changes mean that the picture is now more nuanced than a simple ‘fails to deliver’, but the practical conclusion is broadly the same. This post sets out why.
What the latest LNRS has now made explicit
WECA’s guide for planners, ecologists and developers, together with a dedicated BNG strategic-significance map, now spells out how the 15% Strategic Significance Multiplier uplift is meant to work. To attract the uplift, a proposed intervention must be in a mapped focus area for nature recovery and deliver a measure recommended (mapped) for that location.
Two points in that guidance are worth dwelling on, because they confirm the argument we made in 2025 — this time in WECA’s own words.
First, on baseline habitats. Our January post relied on Defra’s position that the multiplier applies only to habitats created or enhanced after development, not to what’s already on site – the baseline habitat. WECA’s FAQ now states this directly: the multiplier ‘is never applied to baseline habitats in the BNG Metric’. That is significant: it means the strategy can never reward the retention of existing habitat on a development site; but only new or enhanced habitats, and then only where a matching measure is mapped.
Second, on where the mechanism is aimed. The single worked example in WECA’s guide is a developer purchasing off-site BNG units in a focus area. That’s a fair reflection of how the uplift is designed to behave: it’s a tool for steering off-site compensation and habitat banking towards priority locations, not something that typically assists the onsite footprint of a development itself.
How much of Bristol is a focus area?
In January we said it was ‘hard to imagine’ the LNRS helping on most Bristol sites, but we did not put a number on the coverage. We have now done so, using WECA’s own published data.
Taking the Combined Authority’s mapped focus-area layer and clipping it to the official Bristol City Council boundary, 24.2% of the city — roughly 2,640 hectares of its 109 km² — lies within a focus area for nature recovery. (We checked the figure in two independent ways: a regular sampling grid and a random sample of over 90,000 points; both give 24.2%, and the method reproduces the city’s official area to within half a percent.)
This is not a trivial share; anyone tempted to say the LNRS ‘barely touches’ Bristol should note that nearly a quarter of the city sits inside a focus area. But coverage is the wrong thing to count. That 24.2% is a ceiling — the maximum extent over which the multiplier could ever apply — before two much tighter filters are applied: the habitat being created or enhanced must match a measure mapped for that spot, and none of it can be baseline habitat.
Coverage is not opportunity
The more telling question is what is mapped, and where. When we count the individual measures that fall within the Bristol boundary, the focus areas turn out to be almost entirely watercourses and existing public green space that’s unlikely ever to be developed.
LNRS measures mapped within the Bristol City boundary. Management/enhancement of existing habitat and watercourses (teal) dominates; new-habitat creation measures a developer could deliver on a site (amber) are comparatively few.
River and floodplain measures dominate, followed by public parks & green space management and hedgerow, scrub and woodland under management. These are overwhelmingly measures for the management, restoration or enhancement of habitat that already exists — mostly along the Avon and Frome corridors, in the city’s parks, and on railway and river margins. This is land that is unlikely ever to be developed and, under the BNG regime, cannot be used to offset on-site habitat losses; BNG offsets may only be provided by registered Biodiversity Gain Sites (BGS). There are six in the LNRS but, currently, none are in Bristol.
By contrast, the measures a developer might be able to deliver as new habitat on a site — creating woodland, hedgerows, wildflower meadow or mosaic habitat — appear only in the low tens of features and are themselves largely tied to the same green and blue corridors. So, the headline coverage figure and the practical opportunity point in opposite directions: a quarter of the city is mapped, yet the fraction of developable land where a scheme could both sit in a focus area and deliver a matching biodiversity improvement remains very small.
The planning picture
The wider planning position has moved on since January 2025, though not in a way that resolves the problem we identified at the time.
Bristol’s emerging Local Plan completed its examination hearings last year with the final consultation has just completed. We are expecting the inspectors’ final report in the autumn so the plan is not yet adopted and still may not be. In the meantime, the Council having just published the timetable for the 2045 Local Plan which, when it starts this September, will not be completed until April 2029 at the earliest.
Despite this, the two things we flagged in January still stand. No commitment has yet been made to designate any of Bristol’s focus-area sites — its parks, river corridors and green margins as BGSs available for off-site habitat mitigation — one route by which the uplift could be applied. Central Government has still not issued guidance on the role of the LNRS in planning decisions even though the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act requires plans to ‘take account’ of it. Until that guidance arrives, the strategy’s weight in day-to-day planning remains as defined under the BNG regime.
Conclusion
The LNRS is better documented than it was a year ago, and WECA deserves credit for setting out the mechanics clearly. On the specific question we raised in January 2025, that guidance has, if anything, confirmed our reading at the time: the multiplier cannot reward existing habitat. It is built for off-site delivery in priority locations rather than for the sites where most Bristol development happens. As none of these locations in the city are BGS sites, it is practically impossible to apply the 15% uplift they provide.
The new coverage figure sharpens rather than softens the point. Yes, a quarter of the city is mapped as a focus area — but that land is the Avon, the Frome, in parks or railway land, all of which are already managed and enhanced in place. For a developer weighing up a site in Bristol, the chance that the strategy changes their BNG arithmetic is still low and, where it does, it will usually be through habitat bought outside the city.
If the LNRS is to deliver the benefits promised for nature in Bristol, the gap is not in the mapping but in the mechanism: making suitable focus-area land available for off-site mitigation, and — as we suggested in January — allowing the city’s own adopted strategies, from its ecological network to its tree and green-space plans, to carry strategic significance where the LNRS does not.
We suspect that this analysis is also likely to apply to other urban areas across England.
Our earlier explanation of how strategic significance is assessed is set out inAssessing habitat parcels: strategic significance explained. Coverage and measure figures in this post were derived from the West of England Combined Authority’s LNRS layers on itsOpen Data Portal, clipped to the Bristol City Council boundary (ONS code E06000023), July 2026.
Analytical research, policy review and initial drafting were undertaken with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic, 2025). All technical conclusions and professional judgements are those of the author.
Bristol Tree Forum 